The
display also included "the strange,
the magical and the inexplicable"
- a unicorn horn, a five-legged pig and a
mummified cat....

The museum is at 9 Causeway, Horsham, RH12
1HE Tel: 01403 254959

Sir John Soane's Museum

If you imagine a cabinet of curiosities
expanded to take over a whole house and then the
houses next door
- you would
have Sir John Soane's houses in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
He eventually built a
facade across all three houses and opened them as a museum.

The houses combine a kind of gothic
sensibility for unusual and 'awkward' spaces,
with Sir John's preference for
classical ornamentation and sculpture.
The museum has a web-site at http://www.soane.org/

More pictures of cabinets
and early museums

A cabinet made by Philip Hainhoffer and
presented to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632.
The cabinet contained a
mixture of artificial and natural wonders not only in its contents,
but also in
the construction of the cabinet itself, as this close-up reveals: